When Princess Diana died, I was abroad, as I was on Friday evening when Kensington Palace made the shocking announcement that the Princess of Wales had been treated for cancer. While the global media has been as fascinated by Kate’s illness as the British press, when the news broke there was no one in my hotel who wasn’t full of worry and compassion. In a world where Caribbean countries seem over-eager to renounce the crown, a world where Australia appears desperate to become a republic, Friday night certainly reminded me that globally our royal family still commands an extraordinary amount of fondness and respect.
As Anthony Holden wrote at the time: “Diana’s death shook the royal family, shook the country, and brought us all together in the process, in grief. In a decade of convening, of togetherness, of coming together in fields, in clubs, in stadia, in galleries, in magazines, books and films, here we all were, coming together in sorrow.”
I had been told that Sunday morning in August 1997 by the agent who had come to supervise the switchover in the house I was renting with friends in Auch, south-west France.
We briefly tried to find some news on the radio, and then resigned ourselves to picking up details as we made our way to the airport. When we got there, we gleaned more, and swapped information on the plane.
I was with people from the US, from India, Switzerland, the UAE, Sweden, Hong Kong and each was full of concern
Arriving at Heathrow, there were no newspapers anywhere. None in the newsagents, none left discarded on the plastic chairs. It was the biggest news story of the decade and it was impossible to read about it.
When we eventually got into town, I spent an hour scouring the West End for a paper, but there was nothing until I found one last copy of the Sunday Express in a convenience store near Marble Arch.
“6AM NEWS SPECIAL,” it screamed on the front: “DIANA IS DEAD. Princess and Dodi killed in car smash.” The radio and TV were full of little else, but reading the newspaper somehow made it real. The detail was still scant, although what was obvious from the tone of the media coverage was that we were about to enter a period of such intense grieving that it would obviously swamp the partisan nature of the coverage before her death. Before August 31, the nation had been divided into opposing camps — Team Diana and Team Charles — but after the fatal Paris crash, Fleet Street succumbed to melancholia, and if you were a heretic, you kept your head down and your powder dry. Mourning and melancholia, that was the order of the day, and an understanding that empathy and compassion might not be quite so old-fashioned after all, nor indeed a restored sense of social solidarity.
But the thing I will remember more than anything was the look on the agent’s face when she saw us on the Sunday morning. She wasn’t just concerned for Diana (was it really true?), she wasn’t just concerned for Charles, or for William and Harry, or indeed for everyone else who knew her well; she was also concerned for us.
How were we feeling? How were the Brits abroad faring? Like everyone else in the world, she knew how divisive Diana had been, and yet she appeared to be as popular outside the UK as she was inside the M25.
On Friday in Thailand, and more specifically on Saturday, when the news had really sunk in, everyone in my hotel was aghast at the announcement from Kensington Palace.
I was with a bunch of people from the United States, from India, Switzerland, the UAE, Sweden, Hong Kong, all over, and each and every one of them was full of concern. They knew, like most people who care knew, that the royal family has an umbilical link with the British public.
Yes, the world is full of republicans, and a fair few of them live in Britain (as well as inside the M25), but I doubt there’s anyone who didn’t immediately give a thought to George, Charlotte and Louis. They certainly did in Bangkok.
